


Plymouth Gets Spooky

by halflives



Category: Original Work
Genre: English, Zombies, graphic depictions of a need for a cabin in the woods, i'm going to english major hell for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 01:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12244881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halflives/pseuds/halflives
Summary: Everyone's favorite English professors are caught in the middle of the zombie apocalypse!Who will die, who will run, and who will break under the pressure?





	Plymouth Gets Spooky

Plymouth Gets Spooky

English Department RPF

i. 

            The last thing Ann McClellan remembered was teaching her Digitalit class. She was right in the middle of a very important discussion of anal sex and the Omegaverse when loud sirens echoed through the campus, interrupting her. One of the students said something, probably sarcastically commenting on it, but everything past that was white.

            Now, she was lying on the ground of her classroom, Rounds 203, with rug marked etched into her face. She huffed in disgust and rubbed at her cheek, trying fruitlessly to erase them. To, of course, no avail.

            Discouraged, Ann sat up straight, spine against the desk. The room was alight with an orange glow, casting shadows in various places. It was eerie, to say the least, but she was Ann McClellan, head of the English department, Sherlock Holmes expert extraordinaire, and she wasn’t afraid of anything. Mostly. Probably.

She hadn’t even finished her glance of the whole room when there came an insistent knocking on the door.

            Ann frowned at the floor. Maybe she’d fallen asleep during class, and her students had just left her there? It didn’t really seem like something they would do. Nathan, maybe, but not Ryan. Ryan French would have carried her home, she was sure. Or at least he’d have alerted the proper authorities.

            With a soft groan, she rose from the floor, her limbs aching from their previously crouched position against the rug. She was nearly to the door, hand outstretched toward the doorknob in preparation to answer it, when softly, from some corner of the room, came the whisper of, “Don’t do it.”

            Ann didn’t jump. Part of her was expecting someone to sneak out and murmur words in her ear like some sort of half-baked horror movie. She didn’t expect it, however, to be her colleague and friend Liz Ahl, the poetry professor, crouched in the corner.

            “Liz,” she said. “What’s going on?”

            Pressed against the corner of the room with several pens in hand, Liz was looking more like a parody of herself than anything else. The side of her face was illuminated in the orange glow, and her expression was painful at best. She looked like she’d just had to sit through the worst poetry slam of her life. “They’re _out_ there,” she whispered, just loud enough for Ann to hear. “Crawling. Hurting. Screaming. All through the night.”

            Ann frowned. “How long have I been out?”

            “Oh, just three hours.”

            Ann passed Liz until she was standing by the nearest window, hand resting against the cold of the window. The leaves were falling in rippling puddles, and students were milling around, like they usually were. But, wait – there was something wrong. They were stumbling, more than tired college students usually did. One of them was leaving a blood trail behind him.

            The head of the English department could hardly believe her eyes.

            When she turned around, Liz was writing something on the walls. “Elizabeth Ahl!” she cried, extending her arms in confusion like some sort of Sherlock parody. “There are zombies shackling outside, and all you’re thinking about is poetry?!”

            It was, remarkably, characteristic.

            “It’s been like this all day,” she murmured, nearly curling in on herself, unable to leave her corner. “They just will not go away.”

            Ann frowned. “That’s weak.”

            Liz said, “We can’t go out there.”

            “We have to,” Ann said. “There might be more survivors.”

ii.             

            Escaping room 203 was easier said than done.

            Ann did most of the heavy lifting, in conclusion. She broke off the leg of one of the desks in the corner and used it to whack the wandering zombies out of the way. For some reason, there weren’t too many inside Rounds.

            “They’re mostly Adventure Ed students,” Liz provided, scribbling madly away on her arm. She was already halfway through her second poem, and her arms were beginning to look like pale parchment. Her pen was running out of ink. “The ones that scale the building.”

            “You’d like they’d be better at defending their lives,” Ann replied.

            “That makes us sound like conquerors,” the poetry professor’s eyes widened at the concept. “Ah! Perfect. That’s what my next poem will be about.”

            Ann bit back an exasperated groan and dragged Liz by the wrist down the final hallway and toward the front door. Several zombies were milling by, but it didn’t appear that any of them were paying too much attention. “Just like real college students,” Liz said.

            They didn’t go very far, it turned out. The zombified form of Meganne Tuplin scrambled sneakily behind them – “I thought zombies were supposed to be stupid!” Liz cried. “Damn it, I’ll have to rearrange all my poetry.” – but Ann grabbed the pen from Liz’s hand and stuck it in her eye.

            “Barbaric!” Liz said. “I love it.”

            There was some kind of commotion behind Memorial. Sticking to the shadows the trees cast, Ann and Liz crept along the side of the building until they were able to look around the corner. To their surprise, they found the Joes.

            They were back to back and standing in the middle of a crowd. Monninger was armed with a fishing pole, tweed jacket ripped and pulled, and Mealey had a very large tome hooked tightly with both hands. “It’s been a good run, Joe,” Monninger said. “But I think, before we go out, we can agree that I’m the superior Joe.”

            “You’ll have to fight me for the title!” Mealey shouted, and whipped the tome so hard it spun him around and he knocked the both of them over.

            Ann tried to exchange an exasperated glance with Liz, but Liz was too busy trying to dig her fingers into the dirt and use it to write words on the sidewalk. “Men,” she muttered to herself, and ran at the zombified students with her bloodied chair leg.

            “Amazing!” Mealey was yelling, as soon as she disposed of the last student. It was Jesse Giordano, unfortunately – she’d kind of liked them.

            “What’s happening?” Monninger asked, who was on the bottom end of the deal, and couldn’t see anything besides the other Joe’s legs. “Is something good happening? What’s going on?”

            By the end, Ann had hardly broken a sweat. She looked like the poster for _Outlander_ , brandishing her makeshift weapon with two, steady hands. “Ann!” Liz was yelling, and when the three of them were able to get to a vantinge point, they found her halfway through a hole in the ground, trying desperately to transfer her dirt to the sidewalk and finish her poem. “Ann, I can’t finish this poem about you!”

            Monninger pushed himself to his feet and walked over to where Liz was poking out of the hole. The air was tense as he read down the line, and then frowned. “It’s too sad,” he said. “At least there aren’t any dragons.”

            “What the _hell_ is happening?!” Mealey was yelling, his arms pinwheeling once he had obtained a proper stance. “This is the end of the whole world, isn’t it? What did I do with my life? I taught! I taught at this school until the end of my days!”

            “Be quiet,” Ann said. “They might hear you.”

            “We’re going to need food,” Mealey continued, ignoring her. “We’re going to need drink! We have to raid Biederman’s. There’s no other way.”

            “Wait,” Ann interrupted, and Mealey looked positively horrified that she hadn’t immediately agreed to raid his favorite restaurant. “Where’s Monninger?”

            He was halfway down the alumni green when they found him. He wasn’t being very sneaky about it, either – Mealey was just rather loud when he talked about going to get food and beer. “Where do you think you’re going!?” Liz yelled while Ann caught him by the collar of his sports coat, heaving him back. He let out an undignified cry at the assault.

            “Back to my cabin,” Monninger pouted, actually folding his arms across his chest and dropping his chin to his collarbone. “It’s safe there. And quiet. And none of that pesky electricity.”

            “We need food!” Mealey cried.

            “Not yet,” Ann said, who wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, especially after taking down a whole group of gory zombies. In fact, she felt a little sick. But that wasn’t enough to put the Sherlock expert extraordinaire down. “We need to find if there’s any other survivors.”

            Liz chuckled, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was just the English department?”  

iii.  

            “Liz,” Mealey said. “You’re picking all my lottery tickets from now on.”

            Like magic, she was right. They’d traversed through the inner workings of the HUB and found themselves behind the Dining Hall, where the hill sloped down toward D&M. The parking lot just above it was running rampant with zombified students, all screaming and moaning incoherently. And in the middle of them were three English professors: Paul Rogalus, Abby Goode, and Karolyn Kinane, who was meditating not too far from the other two.

            Abby was terrifying. From the moment she met her, Ann had thought her colleague was in impeccable shape, but this was on a whole other scale. Even from their safe distance, Ann could see her eyes wide with the fury of the beast, using her fists and elbows and legs to destroy the zombified students before her. Some of them were even backing away in some perverse sort of fear.

            “Excellent!” Paul was crying, which drew their attention. He was holding one of those handheld camcorders, probably one of the ones you could order from within the IT desk at Lamson Library, and waving his free hand ecstatically. “You show those zombies who’s boss!”

            Abby flung her leg – there was no other possible was to describe it, Ann, the master of the English language, realized with a sharp swallow – toward none other than Kelsey Davis, and the impact was so great that the flesh peeled away and her head went careening in their direction. Mealey gave Monninger a smart shove, and the head landed in his hands.

            “Oh, my,” Monninger whispered. “This is… horrible.”

            “Hey!” Paul shouted when Abby took out the last of the zombies, giving a wild and animalistic scream at the finale. “There you guys are!”

            Ann, the Joes and Liz joined Paul, Abby and KK in the middle of the parking lot. Monninger was still holding Kelsey’s head – when he went to put it down, Mealey smacked his wrist and told him that it might be useful for later. “You knew we were alive?” Ann asked.

            “We guessed,” Paul said. “Or, Karolyn guessed. She’s been meditating the whole time so we haven’t gotten a lot out of her, but I did hear her mutter something or other about the English department surviving. Or it might have been about us all dying.”

            “Foreboding,” Liz commented. “I love it.”

            Monninger was making a face. “Can I put her down yet?” he asked, gesturing to Kelsey’s head. She, even in death, had her mouth half open, as though she were poised to ask a question or jumpstart a meaningful argument. “We can put her to rest, or something.”

            “She might be useful later,” Paul said, lifting the camcorder to film him. “You might want to hold onto that, Joseph.”

            Monninger’s shoulders sagged but he said nothing.

            Abby growled. Liz asked, “What’s wrong with Abby?”

            “Cracked, I think,” Paul said. “She’s been like that since I found her. She hasn’t said a coherent word to me. But hey, it’s been crazy awesome to catch on film. I always thought she was ripped but – come on!”

            “Why are you filming?” asked Ann.

            “You never know,” Paul said with a sickening grin. “We might be one of the last ones left. They’ll need a video about what happened to us?”

            “They?” Mealey asked.

            Paul said, “The aliens.”

            Monninger frowned so deeply it sheared lines into the sides of his face.

iv.

            “I think she needs medical attention,” Monninger pointed out, still holding tightly onto the severed head of Kelsey Davis. He was side-eyeing Abby, who was taking measured leaps more than walking, swinging her arms like some sort of gorilla. “Preferably soon.”

            “We all do,” Ann replied tersely. “Especially the zombie students?”

            They were headed toward the farther reaches of campus, where, perhaps, others had fled. They’d managed to fight off all of the other zombified students they came in contact with, and in the distance, a thin black line beckoned them.

            “Maybe it’s a beacon,” Paul said, employing digital zoom. The whir of the camera echoed in the eerily quiet part of campus. “Calling the survivors. Or the zombies.”

            “Helpful, Paul,” Ann said.

            It wasn’t a beacon after all. It was an electric fence, primed and ready and electrocuting any zombified students which came near. Some recognizable UPD officers were stationed on top, hats on and guns out like glorified mall cops.

            “Hello!” Ann called. “Can we pass through!”

            “Negative!” one of them shouted back. Monninger made a horrible and possibly inhuman sound in the back of his throat at the prospect. “We can’t know for sure if you’re infected.”

            “Then how can we get to safety!?” Mealey shouted.

            “You’re professors,” the officer replied. “Figure it out!”

v.

            It did not end well.

            Monninger was currently moaning from his encounter with the electric fence, which he tried in vain to climb, screaming, “I MUST GET BACK TO MY CABIN!” The shock wasn’t enough to do any serious damage, but he had to be guided back to room 203, which they were now currently defending.

            He was now standing in the corner of the room with a shovel. It was unclear how he got it, but it was keeping him busy – Kelsey Davis’s head resting proudly beside him, he slammed the shovel repeatedly into the rug. “I have to go,” he kept whispering. “The woods are calling.”

            Liz, on the other hand, had covered her hands in zombie blood. She’d kidnapped several mutilated arms and legs from various students and was currently using them to write the saddest of poetry on the walls of 203. Paul was standing beside her, filming gleefully. “This is like a real life horror movie!” he cried. “I’m going to get an Academy Award for this.”

            Ann ran her hands down her face. “This is a nightmare,” she muttered.

            A knock on the door frightened her. She stood ramrod straight like Sherlock approaching her Moriarty, and, desk chair leg in hand, threw open the door.

            It was…

            Mealey?

            “When did you leave?” Ann asked as KK, in the farthest corner of the room, began to hum. Her legs were crossed in the most flexible manner and her fingers were folded together in the traditional, stereotypical stance. She looked like something on an informational pamphlet.

            “It’s okay,” Mealey said, holding up a large, carry-on bag. “I went to Biederman’s.”

            “Joe,” Ann sighed, and Monninger howled as he struck the rug again, Kelsey’s head silently judging him. “I told you—”

            “It’s okay,” Mealey repeated. “I’ve got the beer.”

vi.

            It took about three hours for the door to be broken down.

            They’d snuck outside a few time to be able to build something of a barrier outside 203. It wasn’t perfect but it was working. Or rather, it had worked up until now, when a carefully constructed assault brought it crashing down.

            “Oh, hell,” Ann said. “I should have guessed.”

            At the helm of the attack were none other than her brightest students: the members of her noon o’clock Digital Literature class. The very same students she’d been discussing anal sex with before her own personal lights had gone out. They were crowding in the doorway, with Peter, Lindsey and Tucker in the back, Tim, Libby and Nathan in the middle, and Ryan, Shayla and Olivia in the front.

            Mealey had dropped his drinking and his feasting at their appearance, and he cried, “You’re kidding, right? We’re about to be killed by the coolest of the cool?”

            Somewhere in the sky, the author cackled because although it was something Joey Mealey would never said, it made her feel good about herself.

            Olivia pointed her rotting finger at Kelsey’s head, which was sitting beside where Monninger laid with the shovel over his heart. “You _killed_ her,” she hissed, English incredibly broken. Ann thought, if Olivia were alive, she would have been ashamed by the way she was currently treating the English language and would want to be put out of her misery.

            Which was, of course, easier said than done.

            The hardest one to kill was Ryan French. Sweet, wonderful, do-gooder Ryan was everything Ann had hoped for in a student, and she couldn’t bring herself to bash his brains in. Which meant she was easily overpowered, leaving the room nearly defenseless.

            Abby was caught in a rumble with Lindsey and Peter, unable to catch them just right. She screamed in disappointment, but was otherwise occupied.

            Paul, filming, yelled, “Someone do something!”

            At that very moment, the universe cried out for help, and Karolyn Kinane answered, eyes flashing open and drowning the room in an intense purple light.

            “I will do something,” she said.

            She moved too fast for it to be humanly possible. She was here and then she was there and then she was halfway across the room, limbs moving at blurring speeds. Heads and arms and legs fell to the floor, thumping against the rug and rolling out of sight. Before long, all of the brightest of the English department were dismembered and motionless.

            “Oh my God,” Liz cried. “Karolyn! How did you do that!?”

            KK did not answer. She just closed her eyes and crossed her legs and hummed, softly, inwardly. Ann, lying on the floor with Ryan French’s head close by, let her head rest on the floor with an audible thump.

            Paul said, “Steven Spielberg better shake my God damn hand.”  

vii.

            It was another six hours before UPD found them. The creak of the electric fences powering off echoed through the campus, and was replaced by the blast of music. Every zombified student dropped to their knees. They’d discovered the secret: zombies really hated 70s music.

            ABBA’s Dancing Queen was on its second run through – the UPD officer holding the stereo was a big _Mamma Mia!_ fan – when they approached 203. “You think those professors are still alive?” the one not holding the stereo mused, just as the door swung open.

            They gasped at what they found.

            Joe Mealey was eating meatballs. How had they stayed fresh this whole time? That was the true mystery. Joe Monninger had covered himself in leaves and was curled in a ball beneath them, cradling Kelsey Davis’s head and murmuring about the woods. Liz’s hands were wet with zombie blood from all the sad poetry she’d written, which now covered the walls, the rugs, and some of the desks. Abby was staring at a wall – whispering “YES!” every few seconds – and KK was meditating. Paul was editing footage, and Ann stood to greet them.

            “Is everything okay?” she asked.

            The officer holding the stereo nodded. “What the hell happened here?” he asked.

            Paul looked up from his camcorder to smile devilishly. “You don’t mess with the English department.”

viii.

            “That’s it?” Steven Spielberg said. “That’s the film you told me was going to be the best thing I’d ever seen?”

            Paul sighed. “You’re not getting the point.”

            “And what,” asked David Lynch. “Is the point?”

            “We’re innocent,” he said. “We’re not psychopaths. And _please_ ,” he gestured to the bars around him and the handcuffs holding him and his fellow English professors back. “Let us out of the mental institution.”

            “The film was too dark for me,” Christopher Nolan said. “I couldn’t see a thing!”

            “Not a fan,” agreed Quentin Tarantino. “Lock them back up.”

            “Wait!” Paul screamed. “This was my masterpiece!”

            Ann held a makeshift sign that said “PLEASE HELP”.

            From the back, Abby screamed, “YES!”.

            Continuous ABBA played over the speakers.

            Forever.

**Author's Note:**

> oh dear.


End file.
